There’s nothing like a classical free-swinging, wall-banging Pirates-Phillies series on a hot summer weekend in one corner of the state or the other, and this is certainly nothing like one.
There were plenty of times across multiple decades, lest we forget, when the two Pennsylvania teams tore up each other’s pitching staffs like marauding PennDOT crews, albeit with the menacing lumber of Stargell and Parker and Schmidt and Luzinski.
This is not one of those times.
For the first time in a week, the Pirates Saturday managed to score four times, thrice without hitting a ball out of the infield, and the Phillies tried to duplicate that exact strain of tiny ball in a comically incompetent eighth inning that would leave them a run short in both games of the series so far.